


Between Bodies

by ChookTingle



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Deeply Dubious Consent, Dubious Consent, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Mind Games, induced existential crisis, noncon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 05:08:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15163346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChookTingle/pseuds/ChookTingle
Summary: Adelle DeWitt accesses an imprint. Laurence Dominic reaches for something real, and falls short.'tonight, my ghost will ask your ghostwho put these bodies between us'Set between 'Meet Jane Doe' and 'The Attic'.





	Between Bodies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosecake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosecake/gifts).



The lights come on and the seat rises. He opens his eyes to a familiar office, from a perspective he's only seen once with his actual eyes.

He's in the chair.

He's - heavy, dense, prickly, soft, a rush of confusing sensation that he doesn't resolve until Ivy says to him, "You were asleep, Roger." Okay, he's in someone else's body. He's supposed to be following a script.

"Can I go now?" he says, in someone else's voice. No, that's wrong, that's the back-and-forth the Dollhouse uses when an Active has been returned to its passive state, and he's in someone else's body, so he must have been imprinted. So he should know where to go and what he wants, or at least he should act like it.

Ramirez unfolds herself from the corner of the room. "Yes, let's go, Roger," she says, and there's the clue again - who's Roger? He follows her; that's no trouble, she expects him to follow her. She doesn't even look behind her.

It's all moving too fast. There's a trick he's learned through his nightmares. It's your mind creating the scene, so slow it down. Don't react. Let the thing happen (and usually that means it does happen, over and over again in quick rewind-replay, until you figure out how to move past it, unless you're too caught up in pain or fear or surprise to press - or unpress - your own buttons). He stops on the mezzanine outside Topher's office and closes his eyes.

The world goes away. It's just him and the back of his eyelids, and dull, pleasant noises. It's more peaceful than any memory he can call to mind.

Ramirez' voice. "Roger, are you okay?" Her hand on his arm.

He opens his eyes. She's looking worried. The world hasn't slowed down for him.

That's when he realises he's awake.

* * *

Either Ramirez is in on it, or she doesn't suspect him, because she leads him to the clothing hall without any further sign of unease - and he thinks it's the latter, because she's never struck him as a very good actor. She's Victor's handler. He's in Victor's body, then, and he realises this just before he comes into sight of a mirror, and manages to suppress his reaction to how strange that feels.

He hears Ramirez request an expensive watch, and takes that as a cue to select a nice suit from Victor's rack. While he's changing - trying not to feel strange about getting naked in front of others: this is someone else's body - she returns and picks out three more sets of clothes for him.

Someone wanted him imprinted. Someone wanted him imprinted covertly, because Ramirez called him Roger, and no one returns from the Attic. Who would dare use his imprint after the whole House came together to lock him away? In someone else's shoes, he might take this moment of apparently lax attention to slip Ramirez and get out of the complex, but he doesn't have enough information. Someone wants him. Who, and what do they want?

The watch tells him it's a quarter to two in the afternoon, and displays the date. He's only been in the Dollhouse for a matter of months. It feels like years.

Dressed, he follows Ramirez to the familiar black van.

He has: a strong body, healthy and rested, cash in a wallet, clean clothes. He has his memories, tampered with or untouched he can't tell: the last thing he remembers before waking up is the Attic, the ceaseless tumble of nightmares and reveries.

Someone had to scan his brain while he was in the Attic. For all he knows, that's done routinely. But he doubts it. _Nobody returns from the Attic_ is a mantra with no counterfactual. 

Someone had to scan his brain while he was in the Attic, and now that scan has been imprinted into an Active - okay, what are the possibilities?

They could want information he has as head of security of the Dollhouse, and for some reason they can't access the wedge he knows was made when he was put in the Attic.

They could want his knowledge of Rossum and his reasons to hate the LA Dollhouse's staff.

They could want a scapegoat, an unofficial imprint in an Active with a faulty history, acting out of bounds.

They could want...

The van is pulling up, and Ramirez smiles at him. He smiles back automatically, and wonders how fake it looks.

They've arrived at a beachfront property that he remembers and recoils at. One of the Dollhouse's assets. Obviously. The last time he was here...

Things are starting to click, and in the last few moments between he walks in the door, he cracks his knuckles, rolls his shoulders, hopes he's learned enough about this body to use it.

It's Adelle, of course, and she knows this body better than he does.

* * *

"Mr Dominic," she says, half-turning towards him from where she stands at the far side of the room. She does so love to seize a moment to cut through someone else's pretence, even if she was the one who began it.

"I thought I was Roger," he counters.

A brief, pained smile, acknowledging the riposte. She's not looking well, he thinks. Her makeup is lovely, her hair parted precisely, and she's wearing a long, olive-gold dress that falls in a straight line from her breasts. He doesn't - yet - know why she's chosen it, only that it will have been a careful choice. But there are shadows under her eyes that he can pick out from across the room, and her ramrod-straight pose is eroded, her shoulders sloping.

He blinks away a thousand versions of her face from his mind's eye. She's shown up often in the Attic.

"This house has been swept for bugs," she says plainly. "If you like, I can list the precautions I took. Or you can trust me." 

She knows exactly how few reasons he has to trust her. He can't let that one pass. 

The image of his arm across her throat is one that his Attic memories supply in clear detail. He strides towards her. She brings up her right hand, turning to face him fully, and he sees that she was holding a fencer's foil in it, concealed against the line of her body. There's another on the floor between them. He ducks, and sweeps that one up, slashing ahead of him with it. She strikes and turns and kicks at him, and after a pathetically brief confusion, he's sprawled on his side and her toy weapon is at his throat.

"You don't have to play the part so well," she says, mock-gently. Roger. This house. Lonely hearts. He's had time to put some pieces together in the Attic, and some in the drive over, and he remembers now.

"If that's not what you want, what is it, Adelle?"

Her eyes narrow, disappointed. "Information, of course."

"I've been locked away for months because of you."

"Yes, exactly."

"You care about my prison?"

"Very much."

She moves away and lets him up. He's panting even though he probably doesn't need to pant. He's so unused to this body. He's so unused to _having_ a body. "This is a debrief, Mr. Dominic," she says.

He isn't Mr. Dominic, and this isn't real. Whatever they put in this imprint, it's lacking the normal self-protective sequence that helps Actives avoid thinking about the nature of their roles, even if they're given obvious, huge clues by clumsy or malicious clients. He knows he's a fragment of himself, and when Adelle is done with him, this identity, this sequence of memories, will end. This mind is already dead, a ghost marked for exorcism. It's indecent, the way she pretends she has something to offer him, that he has something to lose.

"Am I alive?" he asks, pressing on the irony as if applying pressure to a wound.

"Yes. You're in the Attic, still. Your body is quite safe."

"That's a stretch of the definition."

"Well. You betrayed me." Cold and unforgiving, as though the fault is only on her side.

"Fine. Tell me," he says, "what's the story here?"

She doesn't hesitate, gives a little nod.

"You're Roger, an English businessman with expensive tastes, who knows me as Catherine, the love of his life. This is our weekend getaway. The getaway I permit myself as a great indulgence - a chance to relax." A shrug, acknowledging the human weakness, but sarcastic; she has little to fear from his criticism, he supposes. "I chose to end those encounters months ago. But," and here her voice takes on a very artificial tone, "who could be surprised at a little human indiscretion? My work is so stressful. The fantasy is so tempting. It's so lovely to escape. And things are getting worse..."

"I'm flattered."

She's unimpressed. "That kind of underestimation, Mr. Dominic," she says briskly, "is exactly what gives me a cover to speak to you."

"I didn't underestimate you," he says. "That's why I'm where I am." _The attic._ "I didn't underestimate Rossum, either. That was you. Or did you think you were safe, because you _were_ Rossum?"

She doesn't flinch, but she stares at him unmoving for a moment in a way that he has come to interpret as a flinch. The absence of a reaction that means she is suppressing one.

"Nothing is _safe_ ," she says, "but our doing makes it so... Rossum does not protect things that have no purpose."

And he is grimly reminded that his body, kept _safe_ , has a purpose, and so does his mind, and Rossum can carve them up, compartmentalise them, to serve different purposes. It's utterly sick, and she will never comprehend how deep the rot goes, in Rossum, in her own ideas.

He opens his mouth to speak, and she stops him.

"I brought you here to learn what you have learned," she said. "It's truly vital information. But let's not have that conversation now. I thought you might like to walk on the beach... read a book... sleep for a full night."

Damn her.

He isn't used to nights and days that fall in order. He isn't used to being able to read a book, to stretch out and close his eyes and and open them again on a world that hasn't changed. He doesn't trust her, but she's offering him - a mind that badly needs it - a chance to trust his environment, and _rest_. He isn't going to turn it down.

* * *

Before he leaves the house, she explains various things that will happen if he tries to escape or seek help from someone. They're not a thorough set of contingencies, but he is quite sure she has kept some things vague, and expects him to understand this. 

He shrugs. He goes for a long walk on the beach. In his normal life - _in life_ , he wants to shorten it - he prefers forests in his leisure time. Or artificial challenge environments: rock climbing, swimming pools. But, having been so long deprived of rich sensation, deprived of the feeling of something around him that is at least as real as he is, if not more so, he walks barefoot on the beach and luxuriates in the sensation of each step. He stares at the clouds on the horizon, imprinting them on his memory.

As if those memories are anything but notations on a sand tablet, soon to be wiped clean; sooner, perhaps, than his footprints on the beach will be.

Back at the house, a delicious meal of high-end take-out has been laid out. He's not very hungry, and he picks at things, but there's a craving underneath his studied disinterest. Taste is lacking in the Attic. Adelle offers a few conversational gambits, but lets silence fall when he does. She deflects his barbs without returning them, apparently not interested in an argument. He eats a little more than he thought he wanted to.

He wonders how she spent these last few hours: working, or fleeing it? Wonders if by seeking solace, he also gave her one.

He doesn't want to give her anything.

After their dinner, he expects a return to interrogation, but Adelle doesn't ask him for anything. She only points him towards a study, where the shelves are lined with books, and there's a stack of recent newspapers and magazines.

He reads, and stretches out the minutes to their full length, and amuses and bores himself in turn.

He sleeps variably. He's plagued with hypnic jerks, and the repeated cycles of coming to, during the night, sitting up, drinking, pacing, and trying to sleep again - these take on a dreamlike feeling of their own. At dawn, with soft light breaking over him, he does sleep, and then he sleeps in with vicious indulgence, enjoying the idea of keeping Adelle waiting and enjoying the pursuits of warmth and relaxation and pure hedonism every time his doze breaks.

He does get up eventually. The novelty of boredom is swift to wane.

There's a breakfast laid out. In the study, a beautifully crafted wooden panel, previously uniform and flush with the wall, is left pointedly swinging open, revealing a computer that turns on.

He spends the first half-hour at the computer in a combination of professional horror and personal hope - there must be a way to get a message out - but there isn't. He has internet access, but his ability to enter text in various fields is severely limited. No comments. No passwords. Quiz buttons are disabled. He can't enable cookies, accept conditions. Nothing. The restrictions are frustrating in a mundane way, ranging from extremely clumsy to presumably wickedly subtle, and he can't overcome them.

But he can read various news sites, and that's how he spends his next hour. He knows how to read the signs. It's not reassuring.

When Adelle knocks, he's been amusing/boring/soothing himself for a while with a dry book, and he has little resistance to her line of questioning.

So they talk about the Attic.

She's a good listener. If he closed his eyes to what else she is, this would be validating. The worst part of the Attic is imagining his - Laurence Dominic's - life terminated without contact. So that he has merely endured out of a primitive instinct for endurance, nothing witnessed or passed on. This, good or bad, is a witnessing.

He looks her in the eye and talks like an ordinary person having a conversation, and wishes this empty validation meant nothing to him.

It does, though, and not just because someone is listening (the person who put him in the Attic).

The interrogation must be over: Adelle fills a deep, awkward pause with a nod to one of the smaller elephants in the room.

"You cared about me, Mr. Dominic, in your own way. Don't think I didn't notice."

Notice, only to use, of course. He sneers.

She gives him a surprised sort of look. "You're lonely, Mr. Dominic," she said, "and no one you cared about has come to rescue you, and you've spent months in the worst part of your own head. Of course I'm taking advantage of that. What can anyone offer you that I can't?"

(She's destroyed him, to offer him a stepping-stone up.)

His thoughts turn lewd, unprofessional, and when he shakes the thoughts away her eyes are still steady.

"My engagements with Victor were sexual," she points out, calmly. "That brings me to another point. I don't want a Rossum executive to review the body indicators of this engagement and find an anomaly."

"You're disgusting," he hisses, meaning it, but she is unmoved.

"This is real," she reminds him, gently, cruelly. "Your hands, your lips, your _body_ , touching another person. People die for the lack of that."

She's watched him submerge himself in the sensation of feet on sand, bask in food that has variety, lean with eagerness towards a listening ear, revel in lazing in bed. Now she suggests touch, knowing her suggestion will feel like an offer, even though it's an order.

And it's Adelle, and yes, he's always been curious about her. Wondered, sometimes admiring, what goes on inside her mind.

Tomorrow, he'll be wiped away, and all that will be left is the mark he's made on the beach, on the house, on her mind. On her body.

She offers him a fraction of what she took from him, and he doesn't want to want it, but of course he does.

He doesn't want to want this. Maybe he can leave her with some guilt.

"I can play along for a while," he says, almost surprised that his borrowed body is genuinely nauseated at the idea, showing its own strange loyalty to him.

"Good."

It's horribly strange when she kisses him. Her narrowed eyes when he looks up. Her utterly impenetrable façade.

She's undressed before he is. Casual, wanton. He feels his own body respond, and it's unexpected and alienating.

"I don't think I signed up for this," he says, one last broken protest.

"Reality is unpredictable," she whispers. "Don't you want this now?"

And he does. He wants it as badly as unbroken sleep. He wants skin pressing against skin and warm, human scents, and the confusion and desire and the ending to it. He thinks he wouldn't care whom, as long as it was real, as long as it wasn't the Attic, as long as it wasn't at gun, whip, knife-point. Ironic, since she's coercing him. He cares that it's her, because for the longest time he cared... He cares that it's her, because she isn't who he thought she was. She's everything he hoped she wasn't. She deserves this, the artificiality. He doesn't.

They move very slowly. Nothing but kissing for a long time; ghosting, almost furtive caresses up and down each other's backs, sides.

It's honestly only that his leg is tired when he stumbles ever slightly back, and she presses, and so they're on the bed, him half-sitting, ignoring and disavowing Victor's body's erection.

She doesn't press or tease. What follows is a half-hour of caresses that he drinks in, reciprocating, without her comment.

Eventually it's his own hand carelessly passing his cock that draws a pained, yearning moan from him, and she sighs at it, pushing at him to lie down. He does. She takes hold of him then, pushing a condom down, stroking and seizing him. He turns his head aside.

She lowers herself down on him, and the sensation is explosive. Nothing like the Attic. Nothing so real. Nothing so warm and wet and clenching and clinging, so seductive and right, so teasing and out of rhythm, so satisfying. He suppresses his groans.

"Adelle," he says, into the quiet above him. "Will you remember?"

"Yes."

He rocks slowly up into her.

He's a dying man, a ghost, an illusion shone through an illusion, and the only mark he'll make on life is the mark he makes on her. It has to count. 

He thrusts, pathetically conflating different effects... Part of him would be proud, count it a notch on his belt. If alive, if able to access this memory.

Every second to be treasured. Every second to be mourned. Every second ticks on until his annihilation.

“I once told... Roger... that he felt realer than anyone I knew. That I could be more real, with him.”

“You couldn’t,” he says flatly. She only sighs again.

It surprises him when she clenches around him, when she comes, almost as if his effort were not required.

"You don't have to," he says, when she renews her own rhythm to make it good for him.

He comes not long after, the body of her virile lover spending within her, within the pulses of her retreating orgasm.

She curls across his chest and he wonders, far too late, if she's using him to punish herself: to remind herself of everything Victor isn't, everything Dominic isn't, everything Roger is that she - _he_ can't have.

In the morning, he dozes with her arm splayed across his chest. He has a brief thought in between dozing: so much trust. It must have been guaranteed.

It seems indulgent to spend so much of the last of his mind's life chasing sleep, but when hope is gone, pleasure may remain.

There's a flash of light in that morning, and he wonders at it, but if it were done well, he wouldn't notice any effect, would he? He notices he doesn't fear the van, and thinks vaguely that he should. He can think without motivation, without meaning, about how he doesn't fear the erasure at his end.


End file.
